Comparing Gothic Elements in Fall of the House of Usher, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ligeia, and American Sl

Comparing Gothic Elements in Fall of the House of Usher, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ligeia, and American Sl

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Comparing Gothic Elements in Fall of the House of Usher, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ligeia, and American Slave

Gothic literature has a number of conventions, including evils of horror, present of light and dark, suggestions of the supernatural, and dark and exotic localities such as castles and crumbling mansions (American). Violence in gothic literature never occurs just for the sake of violence; there is always a moral dilemma (Clarke 209). By going the extremes, a gothic author is able to accentuate a contrast allowing the author's point to be made more easily. American fiction was based on fantasy works of writers like Edgar Allan Poe. Although Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, all used gothic devices in…show more content…

In Poe's Ligeia, the narrator is connected to Ligeia in such a way the reader is left questioning how much of his experience occurred in his mind. There is a breakdown in order on the universal level as well as their personal level, similar to the characters of Stowe and Douglass. Their characters become lost in the white society and lose their own sense of being. Poe's short stories "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "Ligeia" are both classics examples of gothic genre. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, although do not represent our image of a classic gothic story, they do use the gothic genre to represent real life events.

In both Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe shows the downward fall of the characters. Almost immediately in Ligeia, Poe informs the reader that the author's mind in well into this decline, "...and my memory feeble through much suffering" (p 2390). This same idea is also reflected immediately in Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher. In the opening sentence, the reader is told "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens," also reflecting the idea of a downward movement in the lives of the characters. In Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin the characters are in a…

the American Gothic. Already a popular genre in Europe, this new strain of literature in America arose to create a rather abrupt contrast to the Enlightenment foundations upon which American was born. Instead of concerning subjects of liberty and "the pursuit of happiness"; key elements of the American dream, American Gothic literature "embodies and gives voice to the dark nightmare that is the underside of 'the American dream'" (Savoy, 2003, pg. 167) Although containing many similar elements to that…

literary elements that successful authors creatively and effectively combine so as to demonstrate their style, technique, and knowledge of writing fundamentals. In the short stories, "The Lottery" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" written by Jackson and Poe respectively, the authors depend heavily upon the settings within each story to enhance or explore elements such as mood, atmosphere, conflict, and theme. Jackson's "The Lottery" takes place in small town middle America, while Poe's "The Fall of…

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe, renowned as the foremost master of the short-story form of writing, chiefly tales of the mysterious and macabre, has established his short stories as leading proponents of “Gothic” literature. Although the term “Gothic” originally referred only to literature set in the Gothic (or medieval) period, its meaning has since been extended to include a particular style of writing. In order for literature to be “Gothic,” it must fulfill…

Romantic elements in Frankenstein and
The Fall of the House of Usher
Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Fall of the House of Usher, although published in different periods, on different continents, have in common many of the main ideas that stood behind the literary movement of Romanticism (the sublime, the Romantic hero, imagination, isolation), combined with elements of the Gothic (the mysterious and remote setting dominated by a gloomy atmosphere…

The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in the United States in 1852. The novel depicted slavery as a moral evil and was the cause of much controversy at the time and long after. Uncle Tom's Cabin outraged the South and received praise in the North. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin was a major turning point for the United States which helped bring about the Civil War.
Uncle Tom's Cabin is said to have contributed to the Civil War because it brought…

The Influence of the 1850's in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
Despite heartbreaking family separations and struggles for antislavery Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) erupted into "one of the greatest triumphs recorded in literary history" (Downs 228), inspiring plays, pictures, poems, songs, souvenirs, and statues (Claybaugh 519). As Uncle Tom's Cabin was being published in the National Era newspaper in forty weekly installments (x), it was received by southerners as…

Uncle Tom's Cabin, composed by Harriet Beecher Stowe and distributed in 1852, is an abolitionist-themed novel portraying the tragedies of bondage in the United States. It was immensely persuasive, prompted the formation of a basic pejorative, and was maybe even a reason for the Civil War.
The story opens on a Kentucky ranch, home to the kind and venerated Uncle Tom, and the junior Eliza and her tyke. The story has a few significant characters, yet bases on Tom and Eliza. The managers of the homestead…

Edgar Allen Poe's Use of Gothic Setting in The Fall of the House of Usher
"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe has a gothic horror story setting. Gothic means that the author emphasizes the mysterious, the horrible, the ghostly and the fear that can be aroused in the reader. Everyone knows that a gothic story or a ghost story will often have a setting that will be in an old, decaying mansion far out in a desolate countryside. The mansion will be filled with cobwebs, strange…

Compare & Contrast Edgar Allan Poe Short Stories
Introduction
The "Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask of Amontillado" are two of Edgar Allan Poe's most well-known and noteworthy stories. This paper compares and contrasts the two stories and provides and outline as well.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is based on terror just as "The Cask of Amontillado" (hereafter called Cask) is based on terror but there are many different components that Poe uses that contrast with the "Cask," and…

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was the defining piece of the time in which it was written. The book opened eyes in both the North and South to the cruelties that occurred in all forms of slavery, and held back nothing in exposing the complicity of non-slaveholders in the upholding of America's peculiar institution. Then-president Abraham Lincoln himself attributed Stowe's narrative to being a cause of the American Civil War. In such an influential tale that so powerfully points out…